John Resig - Google Groups is Dead
http://ejohn.org/blog/google-groups-is-dead/

This post isn't so much about the usefulness of mailing lists as a discussion medium, it's the complete failure of Google Groups as an adequate purveyor of public discussion software. For the jQuery project we're already in the process of moving the full discussion area to a forum that we control. We should have it set up, and everything moved over, within the next month or two. There is one area in which Google Groups continues to shine: Private, or restricted, mailing list discussions. However any attempts at using it for a public discussion medium are completely futile. The primary problem with Google Groups boils down to a systemic failure to contain and manage spam. Only a bottom-up overhaul of the Google Groups system would be able to fix the problems that every Google Group faces.